Old news, but it deserves to be shared anyway: Streetmix.net is a service that allows you to create street section views with an assorted library of basic materials in a few clicks, which later can be stored or shared through social media. A nice and swift way to visualise street planning principles, complete with annotations and descriptions.

Our projects for Sortland municipality has been delivered and presented. With great room for freedom, the projects were very diverse across the scale from detail concept plans to overall strategies for green structures. In a project such as this, the challenge was first and foremost where to begin: we had the impression that so much was needed here, almost anything would be an improvement.

I started early on with the impression of a town in need of better structure and planning (see my earlier post), and decided to work in two directions: One to develop a 3D model of the town, so it would be easier to analyse the area in full, as I felt I needed more data than what I had time to collect beforehand and while we were there on excursion. I simply didn’t feel I knew the place. I had access to some resources – Google street views covered the main road through the town, and a GIS model from the Norwegian Webatlas were helpful to get an overview of the surroundings, but I felt it wasn’t enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Our area of study this semester is the town of Sortland, located in Vesterålen in Northern Norway. A town in expansion, as opposed to others in the region, this is a place set in spectacular surroundings; (arguably) competing with the tourism in the more “commercial” Lofoten.